Kjersti Lohne: Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice
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Kjersti Lohne: Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019, ISBN 9780198818748, 288 pp, £80, Hardcover Leila Ullrich1 Accepted: 16 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
2020 has been a contradictory year for criminal justice. After the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on 25 May, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests erupted first in the United States (US) and then in many other countries. The BLM movement has exposed the violence of the carceral state, demanding the defunding of the police and the abolishing of prisons. As Human Rights Watch (2020) tweeted on 7 June, “this wasn’t just about one rogue police officer. This was representative of a system, a system that doesn’t value black lives.” Meanwhile, in June 2020, the US Government imposed sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC) who are investigating war crimes in Afghanistan including by US forces. The decision was met with an international outcry. Amnesty International (2020) condemned it as “yet another assault on vital institutions that help people look after one another and provide survivors of rights abuses with justice”. So while domestic criminal justice is increasingly on the defensive, human rights organisations still herald international criminal justice as a solution to mass violence. Both systems are discriminatory. The majority of prisoners in the US are black and brown (Nellis 2016) and the same is true of the ICC (not a single white person has so far been charged at the Court). Kjersti Lohne’s book helps us to make sense of that contradiction (Lohne 2019). Advocates of Humanity sheds light on the human rights organisations that helped to create the ICC in 1998 and continue to advocate for it. Women’s rights organisations were at the forefront of this advocacy (Grewal 2015; Ullrich 2019). Organisations such as the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice see the ICC as an important instrument for achieving gender justice. A key part of that mission is to ‘end impunity’ for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). As Lohne argues, “in the international area, no other issue has undergone a more * Leila Ullrich [email protected] 1
Queen Mary University of London, London, England
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accelerated process of criminalization than that of sexual and gender-based violence” (Lohne citing Sandvik 2019, 173). The gendered and racialised victim of rape in conflict “provides a particularly powerful victim imagery” for international criminal justice (Lohne 2019, 156). And yet, it is not clear whether human rights organisations have much more grounds to speak on behalf of victims than the Court has. They are usually based in The Hague, London or Brussels, use similar language and bureaucratic procedures as the ICC, and are staffed by white legal professionals. These ‘experts in horror’ (Mégret 2001) rotate freely between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the ICC often hoping to ‘move on’ to more lucrative jo
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